


More Than Mortal

by nagapdragon



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Merlin (TV), Sherlock (TV)
Genre: but there I promise you, except they're kind of offscreen, late night fic, like really, shove everyone in Hogwarts, there may be gods
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-20
Updated: 2014-08-20
Packaged: 2018-02-13 23:04:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2168643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagapdragon/pseuds/nagapdragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Magic has to come from somewhere. </p>
<p>It was a simple assumption, one that was second nature to those born into the Wizarding world, where they understood that so long as they could cast spells, the deities powering them must still be extant. Wizarding blood, as it exists today, is a dilution of the blood of demigods, and many of the greatest witches and wizards in history were either demigods themselves or throwbacks to the old blood.</p>
<p>I don't really know, and I wrote it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	More Than Mortal

_“No!”_ Sherlock roars, and John’s world brightens in that adrenaline-fueled moment between seeing the knife and the hot brand it leaves in its wake, and then the darkness comes.

_Goodbye, old friend_ , he says with a mouth that cannot speak, and then he feels the Reaper by his side. _There is no place I would rather die than right here next to you._

 

***

 

Magic has to come from somewhere. 

It was a simple assumption, one that was second nature to those born into the Wizarding world, where they understood that so long as they could cast spells, the deities powering them must still be extant. Wizarding blood, as it exists today, is a dilution of the blood of demigods, and many of the greatest witches and wizards in history were either demigods themselves or throwbacks to the old blood.

Merlin, predisposed to prophecy and his renowned wisdom by the virtue of being a child of the Old Religion, where those who were most touched by magic went out on the nights when the Veil thinned between mortal and immortal to beget more half-mortal children. All of the great sorcerers in his time were as such, half-mortal beings for whom the rules of nature bent, with him the least mortal of them all.

John, newly introduced to his heritage and all it entails, to the secrets borne by the absent father he doesn’t share with Harry, was fascinated to hear the legends made truth in class. For Sherlock, it was stories he heard firsthand a thousand times. Merlin is a recluse these days, but always a fixture at Mummy’s exclusive dinner parties in between his King’s incarnations, and always delighted to speak fondly of past adventures. Especially to curious young boys playing at knights or pirates or a myriad of other things, where he could correct a stance or tell them the proper way to defend a walled city from an undead army. 

By all the conventions of their society, it was an unusual beginning. A clever Slytherin with one of the least-mortal bloodlines in modern society, the rest of his House alternately fawning over him or recoiling in carefully hidden disgust, raised with full knowledge of his heritage and gifts, assigned to work with a Muggleborn Hufflepuff who is perfectly ordinary and as eager as they all are, before they see the ugliness beneath. 

Some of them never do.

It was supposed to level the groups, to pair those raised outside of Wizarding society with those raised inside it, and John Watson was the only Muggleborn with enough natural magic to resist the swirl of Sherlock’s own untamed power. Nobody expected it to go well, least of all Watson’s Housemates, but Professor Binns used up his quota of recognizing the existence of his students to assign the groups and continued with his lecture regardless of their objections.

“Sherlock,” John would sigh, sounding much older than eleven, “you can’t keep trying to find the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets to go investigate a crime fifty years old.”

“1943 was forty-nine years ago, _John_ ,” Sherlock would complain, but set aside books purloined from the Restricted Section and criticize his way through helping John with his homework on dividing the Arthurian mythos that the mortals tell from the history of Merlin’s far more interesting exploits. 

“Sherlock,” John sighed when he found him skipping dinner to tempt the thestrals out of the Forest and ride them, “your brother keeps sending minions to bother me since you promised to eat with him today and are riding invisible horses again instead.”

“ _Thestrals_ , John, thestrals. They’re not like horses at all.”

“Well, it isn’t like I can see them, so ‘invisible horses’ will have to cut it.”

“Good,” Sherlock murmurs to the closest thestral, patting noses and promising treats while the skeletal horses press against him in a crowd of leathery wings and glossy coats and the ethereal smoke of death, almost like a ghostly aura, that clings to them in his eyes. 

“Cedric- you know Cedric, third year in my House? He says the only people who can see thestrals are those who have witnessed death firsthand.”

“There are exceptions,” Sherlock tells him, storming off to the castle to get dinner with Mycroft over with.

For John, Christmas was lovely, a brief visit to his family back home before spending the rest of it with Ravenclaw Molly Hooper and Gryffindor Greg Lestrade with Professor Hudson, a motherly witch with a fondness for stray students.

For Sherlock, it was an awkward affair with Mummy ( _accomplished witch from a pureblood line who keeps the identities of her sons’ fathers more of a secret than the location of the key to their Gringotts vault_ ), Mycroft ( _newly graduated with a minor position in the Ministry that includes weekly meetings with the Minister_ ), the Malfoys and the Moriarties, and of course, because no party is complete without a seemingly immortal and un-aging wizard who treats everyone like children despite the fact that he looks all of seventeen himself, Merlin.

And, just to make things more uncomfortable than half a dozen Slytherins, the Dark Overlord of the Ravenclaws, his insufferable brother, and an immortal teenager, this time they got to add first-year Gryffindor Arthur Pendragon, reincarnated _again_ , his fantastic Slytherin half-sister Morgana, and the Minister of Magic himself.

_This,_ Sherlock reminds himself, _this is why everyone thinks the Ministry is corrupt._ Which it is, of course, but only by those who know how to play Minister Pendragon’s righteousness against him. 

He was happy to get back to Hogwarts, to complain/tell stories to John and learn some curses that the Headmaster would prefer remain hidden from Morgana in the secrecy of the Common Room. 

And before they realized it, the project was long-gone and the year was over and somehow, they’d become the unlikeliest of friends at the heart of a menagerie of psychopaths and heroes and ordinary witches and wizards, and they all knew it was sort of forever.

 

***

 

“Mr. Holmes, we have our best medi-witches and wizards on it, but we would not be too optimistic quite yet. Mr. Watson is in very critical condition, and to be perfectly honest, we’re not entirely sure what’s still forcing him to breathe and his heart to beat. Our diagnostic spells are going haywire.”

Sherlock tunes the receptionist out as they try to force him to rest. In the chairs behind him, Molly weeps into Lestrade’s embrace, Morgana and Draco discuss the best ways to deal with grown-up but still irritatingly Gryffindor annoyances to disguise their nerves, and despite all the tension in the room only Merlin seems to pick up on the one thing missing from this situation.

“The reason he’s surviving beyond all expectations,” Merlin states, awful at conversation with anyone who isn’t constantly dying and being reincarnated around various world-changing conflicts, “is going to kill you.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“You’re playing with magic you don’t understand, with power beyond your ken.”

“If you tell me not to go that far, you’re a bloody hypocrite,” Sherlock snaps at him, earning an affronted look from the ancient wizard and a tactical retreat to Arthur’s side. 

He can feel Merlin’s eyes on him anyways, watching the lack of his natural swirl of wild magic, and he continues to shore up the force of his will against the battering of John attempting to die from his wounds.

_You can’t die unless I permit it, and I don’t._

 

***

 

At twelve, Sherlock could _feel_ the monster coming, feel the deaths that clung to it, and he kept John nearby at all times. The monster can’t harm him, he knows that deep inside, despite being unable to prove it to anyone. It runs from him, and he spends hours tracking it through Hogwarts trying to keep it trapped in the hidden corridors and away from others. When he sleeps, it takes advantage and attacks, but the Slytherin dormitories are safeguarded by his very presence. He wraps tendrils of his wild magic around John and Molly, their only friends raised entirely in the Muggle world, to try and extend his protection. Draco mocks him for it and Arthur wants him to help organize a direct confrontation, but he protects his people. 

He feels Ginny Weasley’s death swirling around her, deep under the castle, and an unnatural presence that stinks of death yet is untouched by it. He feels the monster die, its own death overpowering the deaths clinging to it, then fading completely from his senses where he lies in his bunk. He feels Potter’s death circle him, then the destruction of the unnatural presence, and then Potter’s death vanishes without claiming him. 

He never tells anyone, not even John, quite how much he did to protect them or quite how much he knows about what went on underneath the castle that day. He wandered up to the bathroom that day, stood in front of the sink that death ripples around the edges of, with Moaning Myrtle in silent attendance. 

At thirteen, he barely visited the thestrals anymore, disgusted by the un-death that the Dementors carry with them, the end of life without the accompanying physical death. It leaves him vomiting into the Forest when they patrol too closely to his beloved thestrals, picking at his dinner in the Great Hall while Morgana threatens to have Arthur force-feed it to him, and generally surprising everyone with how incredibly lackluster he can be after the manic energy of the year before.

The Patronus is the best thing he learns, teaching himself in the middle of the night until what might be either a octopus or one of the Elder Gods takes over one of his pillows, sheltering him from the Dementors’ wrongness.

At fourteen, Sherlock sulked while John was completely smitten with the girls from Beauxbatons, spending his days with Morgana while she obsessed about her oh-so-perfect prat of a brother and with Draco obsessing about perfect Potter with his stupidly untidy, perfect hair. Molly and Lestrade are cloyingly sweet, almost sickeningly so, and Professor Hudson decides that he’s one of her lost students in need of mothering. John almost completely ignores him chasing after powder-blue uniforms and long blond hair until the Third Task.

He feels Cedric’s death resonate through his imprint on the maze, his most recent location, and realizes before anyone else that one of the champions has been transported outside of the maze. He feels the _wrongness_ from the Chamber of Secrets, in second year, except far stronger and further away, but drawn close enough to make him nauseous by its role in Cedric’s death, resonating across a pitch still full of cheering fans and the band and general excitement. 

“Sherlock?” John asks, “Sherlock?!?”

A fresh wave of the unnatural undeath on top of Cedric’s death rolls over him as Potter appears in front of the maze, doubled over Cedric’s still form, and Sherlock passes out into John’s arms. By the time he wakes, their world has changed and the Prophet is already starting their smear campaign against Potter. 

That summer, Merlin teaches him to suppress his nature, to not be overwhelmed by the death and undeath and not-quite-death that follows Voldemort’s return, and Sherlock is so thankful that he was too young to remember what must have been torment of an infant overwhelmed by all the deaths at the end of the First Wizarding War and Voldemort’s affront against nature.

At fifteen, he and Morgana study the Old Religion to learn to defend themselves with their wild magic. Lestrade and Molly, rule-followers to the end, keep their heads down to survive in this new Hogwarts under Umbridge. Draco and Moriarty, more often known as His Frightening Highness the Dark Overlord of Ravenclaw, politic themselves into advantageous positions in Umbridge’s favor. On the other side, John and Arthur join Dumbledore’s Army, drawn in part by the justice and in part by the ridiculous risks to stay undiscovered. 

After John tells him about the Veil in the Department of Mysteries, he begs Mycroft to show it to him and, for the first time in his life, feels a resonance of his own wild magic against its counterpart at the boundary of Realm of the Dead.

At sixteen, Draco and Moriarty stop showing up for things, having private conversations and skulking around. John and Arthur and Lestrade and even Molly are on the side of the angels, and he helps them occasionally, but only when Mycroft can’t send him information and evidence from Wizarding murders for him to identify. Even with ghosts who have moved on, he can pull trace memory from their death with any personal belonging that their magic had imprinted on. It keeps him busy, keeps him from being bored.

He feels Dumbledore dying slowly, the specter of the Reaper closer and closer every time he sees the man, scythe inching around his neck. When he is killed, the sudden change in the death he’s most attuned to wakes him in the middle of the night. He’s the only one in the dormitory awake when Draco sneaks in, shaking in full-body tremors. 

Sherlock doesn’t mention anything.

At seventeen, he fights. 

They all do, in some way or another, but he’s particularly effective with his ability to sense fatal strikes before they come and shield appropriately. At the Battle of Hogwarts, he can sense Voldemort and that awful snake of his and whatever always rang wrong against his senses in the Room of Requirement and Potter, a faint echo of it in Potter. 

When the battle is over, he retreats into the mortal world while everyone else picks up the pieces of their broken lives, and when Mycroft finds him he helps to hide him from the world. He discovers cocaine at this time, and only Merlin’s timely interference at several occasions saves his life when he can feel the coil of his own death. 

The year blurs in his memory, full of John _dirty bloody hurt John, the warrior_ and the constant pull of deaths for him to attend to, though he can do nothing about it. 

He shoots up to forget.

To some degree, it works.

 

***

 

When John wakes, it is a miracle, and the first time since the basilisk targeting Muggleborns that Sherlock is truly thankful for his wild magic.

“Sherlock,” John croaks, and it is the same old admonishment from their childhood when he pushed himself too hard and forgot to eat or sleep or go to class.

“He saved your life,” Molly says from the corner, clever Molly who figured it out from Merlin’s sideways looks and her own brilliant mind, sweet Molly who always bears the faintest tinge of death from working here at St. Mungo’s but which is almost obscured now by the glow of new life growing inside her. She doesn’t know yet, but he does.

“How?” John asks, wincing at the sound of his own voice.

“My father is Death,” Sherlock announces, and then he passes out.

 

***

 

Sleep overtakes John, and this time, it is with Sherlock in the bed beside him, still sleeping, recovering from what Merlin described as pitting his will and his magic against John’s body’s attempts to follow the natural order and die. 

_Hello, old friend_ , he tells himself as sleep creeps over him, _there is no place I’d rather live than right here next to you._

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked More Than Mortal, I'm expanding this universe (cough cough starting over from the beginning) in Witches, Wizards, and Wandering Gods, which is linked from this page. 
> 
> And I'd love to hear feedback! Drop me a comment here or come talk to me at nagapdragon.tumblr.com- I swear I don't bite!

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Witches, Wizards, and Wandering Gods](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2215434) by [nagapdragon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagapdragon/pseuds/nagapdragon)




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